I live and work in Florida.
From my living room balcony, I can sit and sip a cold one while watching the boats on Boca Ciega Bay.
A 100-yard stroll from my front door takes me to a beautiful Gulf beach.
Idyllic.
Until it isn’t.
My family had our debut hurricane season last year and it was a doozy.
Hurricane Irma made landfall in Florida on September 10th as a category three storm and ripped its way through the Sunshine State.
Fortunately, on our highly vulnerable barrier island in the Tampa Bay area, the intensity and resultant damage was not as bad as the worst forecasts had suggested.
However, after 25 years in the crisis response business, it helped me understand first-hand just what we are trying to anticipate and manage when we write those crisis plans for ‘Extreme Weather’.
Cell phone service down.
Power outages lasting days.
Roads closed with debris and downed trees.
Soon after Hurricane Irma, I had the opportunity to discuss with HMS, a long-time client of In Case of Crisis, about how it had deployed our crisis management platform before and during the storm.
What struck me was how well they used In Case of Crisis to check in and assure the safety and well-being of its Florida-based employees – but more importantly, how HMS had spent TWO years preparing for this moment with its emergency response planning.
It had virtually all employees enrolled on In Case of Crisis, linked to the app via their cell phones.
They had put the teams through emergency drills.
They had created an Emergency Response Virtual Command Center Centre at its HQ in Irving, Texas.
You can read more about how HMS managed its hurricane response here.
Earlier this year, In Case of Crisis sponsored a luncheon for members of the Tampa Bay PRSA.
We listened carefully as representatives of Allstate told an impressive and similar story – it’s all the hard work BEFORE a storm strikes that makes a crisis plan work during the bedlam that follows.
Now would be a great time to go back to your own emergency response plans.
Ask yourself what more you could be doing NOW that would make the plan effective should the worst happen.
